Guild Wars 2

I rather like Ebonhawke myself, decent lay out by and large.

Doggie.3184:

I hate stacking because it’s a mechanic not built for my Squishy Thief. XD
Then again, what is?

I cringe every time I have to stack in guild dungeon runs.

Yah there is one tweak I wish they would add though. The tagging system lends itself to copious AOE to maximize profits in events. Say you backstab a single enemy for 8k or w/e. The guy next to you clusterbombs for the same. One player gets more drops. Why?

I have personally thought it wouldn’t be terrible for Eles to have two weapons on the palette with 2 attunements on each weapon. No more skills than currently. But not locked into a single range of attack. Enemy up close and personal? D/D. Further out? Staff or Scepter or w/e. Being locked into a range is one of the reasons my Ele is on the shelf at level 31 or so.

Sadly work and some dying components have kept me from getting to experiment further with SS. Sometime next week I should have a nice new rebuild in which I can apply some of what I have read in the thread. Hoping it can renew my enjoyment of the class.

Dahkeus.8243:

I don’t see what all the controversy is with this trait.

If your group is stacking 25 stacks of vuln, then swap out Sundering Strikes for Mug on boss fights. On trash fights, I can’t think of a reason to not take this trait, particularly since it works so well with S/P.

I think I may just try sword pistol/shortbow again with it now so I can drop ricochet which was eating trait points. Used to rather enjoy sword/pistol in dungeons.

I’ll be honest I was not expecting changes to crit damage. So I’m interested to see what they feel will be an appropriate change.

So far I completely agree with you and even if I manage 25 stacks by myself it probably won’t be worth it. Still going to keep trying in case something comes of it though.

So with the changes to Sundering Strikes has anyone managed to shoehorn that into a dungeon build? Been playing around with sigils, runes etc. Haven’t quite come up with anything satisfactory just yet myself. Getting there, but it’s getting hard to squeeze out more performance. I would just like to get some high vulnerability in dungeons so I could justify taking my thief over my engy.

Yah SoM is brilliant in many circumstances. But I don’t use it for WvW and it is arguably better in almost every way from what I have seen of this venom heal so I am even less tempted to use it for WvW.

I’m not against thieves having support builds. In fact I gave venom share an honest shot. I used it primarily for almost every single dungeon path in the game and I used it in WvW with guildies. The only time I did not feel completely kitten was when I could get every party member. I might actually reconsider venom share if one of two things were met. 1. If venoms were f2-4 skills like suggested above or if in parties it triggered all bonuses on all party members with a much much larger range. But this heal skill even if it triggers all venom trait bonuses just makes a bad build slightly better… Maybe.

One other thing that might help is if the life leach could trigger on all venoms used per strike so you didn’t have to pace out the venoms to get the most damage out of them. Let’s be honest the most likely way you are going to get everyone is during a stack. But if the the trigger radius was much much larger this might not be an issue anyways.

I rather enjoy leaching venoms with venom share. I pretty much exclusively play it in WvW. My guild usually runs a 3-6 man team and I find the lack of experience people have in fighting against it, hits opponents hard. Don’t even get me started on being able to distribute on demand snares to my guildmates. I also exclusively use it in dungeons with my guild. For solo play though, I can see how it leaves a lot to be desired. Nice way to bolster unloads damage though if you time the venoms correctly.

Part of me wishes that leaching triggered for each venom use as opposed to each strike that used venom(s). I prefer to stack them all at once for a large might boost with fury, swiftness and more might from stealing. Yet doing so means sacrificing dps and heals from spreading out the leach hits over the battle. Worse yet, trying to hit everyone as the battle unfolds is sketchy unless everyone is close to each other. Thankfully it is much much better than it used to be.

All said I would like to see this get a trial run as I still feel like venoms are not necessarily where they could or should be.

I would have to play it that way to see if it felt right to me. Hard to imagine it just going by the numbers. Would be cool if a dev tool/instance could allow you to test nerfs and buffs in a controlled environment on the fly.

Seems to me that with a change up to traits p/p could be either standard or condition damage. Say you increase the fire rate of p/p 1. Maybe even the animation so it doesn’t look too awkward and both pistols are used in the animation.

Perhaps a trait that had a chance to apply bleeds on every pistol shot. So unload could stack bleeds nicely and doesn’t ignore your condition stats entirely. This I feel would make p/p viable for both play types. Now this would still likely leave a lot to be desired in some aspects of PVE of course. But for what it is worth with ricochet you could spread bleeds across multiple enemies. Still out in the cold for world bosses though.

Just a thought.

Things like this make me hope that one day we can at least swap out some skills on weapon sets to better suit our builds. Say for instance if we wanted to swap out DB for a single target skill or something, say Temple Strike that could act as an interrupt. Both could have a place for different builds.

I second this myself. Was just saying the other day to some guild mates that getting some level scrolls while playing on my main would be great for leveling my alts. I will say that the level 20 scrolls are a nice start.

Not sure how others feel and this may very well be because of my older mmo experiences. But something I miss is having to tread through a zone without fast travel. Admittedly this is good for many reasons though.

I was thinking about gw1 and the desert zones. Always liked them a lot. And I got to thinking about how you had buried treasure and secrets in Elona that had loot. I was thinking if a similar mechanic was brought into a zone but with minimal to no WPs. It could have reset times based on daily/weekly. Buried treasure, “Do not touch!” locations like in Elona, Grottos, caves etc. All laced with rewards and or scavenging items that pertain to other areas.

Mobs could be given certain scavenger hunt items in their drop tables also just so they don’t gate content but contribute to it also. Scavenger items found at locations and from mobs could include map items like in the Eye of the North, special keys like we used to use, or parts of items that when gathered can be crafted for special skins. Just a partially thought out idea.

Yah I’ve always found it odd when achievements require that sort of gameplay. Aren’t they supposed to be a reward for accomplishing something? Instead they just end up being a “Hey good job on playing the game poorly by accident/purpose” reward. A more egregious example would be getting downed by a rabbit 10 times in a row. That’s an extreme example but where do you draw the line. These achievements really should be a reward of standard or good, not convoluted/poor gameplay.

I just find it cramps on the typical motif of don’t wait around to play. Event failed? Ok cool, wait around for awhile because if you leave you are not getting back in. All said I think the timer was the prime mistake. It still would have been an engaging and active fight without the timer. That’s what I want. Active and engaging content that is doable. This world event is what I want from a world event minus the time constraints of waiting and failing because of an arbitrary number. That and overflow, which I’m not sure that is something I can realistically expect to be solved.

On the bright side though. The fact that Teq is no longer a stand here and hit the 1 key boss is great. Haven’t been this engaged in an mmo boss since PSU; which is more like a gw1 “mmo” than an actual mmo.

My friend has found the recordings but not the refugee items. Perhaps they removed the items already but not the recordings?

Deca a crossbow would actually be very nice for that matter. I just want some sort of ranged single target damage outside of pistol pistol. That is just kind of meh to me.

You know it is funny I have never seen a topic talking about rifles for thieves. It might however be a limitation on the thread search engine though.

Don’t get me wrong I already knew it would be seen as a cliche by many to have the rifle for thief, but where do you draw the line for cliches? Certainly pistol pistol has to be more of a cliche than a rifle for thieves? It doesn’t even have to be focused on burst damage. Like someone said it could be a sort of debilitating weapon. Certainly in the grand scheme of things options are not a bad thing.

I also don’t think “wrong game, wrong class” is a set of logic that can be employed very well. A lot of this game relies on tried and true concepts; fighters have big swords and less conventional concepts; casters have big swords.

Not speaking from any sort of balance perspective am I the only one who wishes we had access to rifles? I feel due to how necessary shortbow is for tagging in events it wouldn’t see much use much like pistol/pistol. That said what do people think?